Feddit.org announced today that they are changing their rules to match German law despite their server not being hosted in Germany.
Feddit.org now bans
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The sentence “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”
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Comparing Israel to the Nazis
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Calls to end Zionism
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Calling for the dissolution of Israel
And much more. The full original post can be found here, or
Click here for full text of original post:
Hi.
In the past few days, discontent regarding mod decisions in this community has been brewing, particularly when it comes to comments on Palestine, Israel, and Israeli politics and actions. There are also misunderstandings regarding mod intention and German law. We hope to clear that up with this post.
While the servers of feddit.org are in Austria, most of the mods of this community as well as admins of this server live in Germany. Speaking of, our server admins have also posted a write-up on the same topic.
And with that, let’s go:
In Germany, antisemitism is specifically sanctioned in German criminal law, both for speech and as a motivation for other criminal behavior. In addition, Germany seeks to protect the Jewish state of Israel (the so-called “Reason of State” introduced in 2008) and thus verges toward protecting Zionism as well. Certain criticism of Israel/Israelis is also categorized as “Israel-related antisemitism”.
Since criminal law is involved, enforcement can mean things like police raids and device confiscations. After such police action, it does not really matter if it was appropriate or if cases are dropped or never charged: The damage is done. All told, it’s not that fun.
There is also no point in engaging in discussions about the veracity of statements that could get us into legal trouble. In addition, we believe that you can express most opinions without breaking rules.
If your comment contains the following, it will be removed from this community:
- Calling for the dissolution of Israel, or calling for a one-state solution without specifying equal rights for all people; Jewish in particular.
- Calling for a destruction, annihilation, an end of all Zionism or the like.
- Equating Israeli actions and (historical) Nazism.
- The slogan “from the river…”
- Endorsement of or justifications for Hamas or Hezbollah, or slogans or graphics positively referring to these organizations. These are considered terrorist organizations in Germany.
- … and obviously: Any of the common antisemitic tropes or calls to violence against Jews or Israelis
Comments will not be removed for the following:
- Denouncing genocide.
- Denouncing Israeli war crimes.
- Criticizing Zionism as an ideology or political movement.
- Referring to the current Israeli government as “criminal,” “expansionist,” or “far-right”.
If your comment is removed nonetheless, these are not the reason. I’d also like to stress that this community was never a free-speech-absolutist zone: It is a (usually lightly) moderated community. There may also be times when bans go too far. In such cases, please DM the @EuroMod@feddit.org account (which all mods have access to).
To help you understand why, I'll leave an assortment of sources here (translations via DeepL).
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Berlin in mid-May [2024] around 6 o’clock in the morning. A loud, continuous “banging” against the apartment door wakes student Alina T. from her sleep. […] When her husband opens the door, several LKA officers, two employees of the district office and the SEK “storm” past him into the apartment. Puzzled, he looks at the search warrant. […] The background to this was a Facebook entry in the student’s profile: "From the river […]
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In November 2023, the Federal Ministry of the Interior and for Home Affairs also issued a prohibition order against Hamas.[60] According to the order, “the slogan ‘From the River to the Sea’ (in German or other languages)” is a distinguishing mark of Hamas[61]. […] the current legal situation [regarding “Denial of Israel’s right to exist”] is - contrary to what the statements of the Federal Ministry of Justice suggest[63] - anything but clear. Whether incitements to eliminate the State of Israel are prosecuted depends on the respective legal opinion and the prosecution will of the respective public prosecutor’s office.
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Press release from the previous government:
In this context, Section 111 StGB, which covers public incitement to commit crimes, may also be relevant. Incitement to extinguish Israel’s existence by force may be punishable under this provision. The same applies to calls to publicly display the Hamas flag. If Hamas attacks are publicly cheered and celebrated, this may also be punishable. This means that people who cheer on Hamas’s actions or publicly express their sympathy with the attacks may constitute the criminal offence of “approval of criminal acts” under Section 140 of the German Criminal Code (StGB).
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In connection with the controversial Palestine Congress in Berlin, the German authorities have also imposed an entry ban on former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. “In order to prevent antisemitic and anti-Israel propaganda at the event”, several entry bans have been issued, the news agency AFP learned from security sources on Sunday. One of these concerned Varoufakis. (Notably, Varoufakis would have spoken about one-state solutions …)
federal reverse (on behalf of the mods of !europe)
Man, seeing Germany side with genocide once again was fucking not on my bingo card.
I don’t imagine things will get better under the new right-wing government either.
Comments will not be removed for the following:
- Denouncing genocide.
- Denouncing Israeli war crimes.
- Criticizing Zionism as an ideology or political movement.
- Referring to the current Israeli government as “criminal,” “expansionist,” or “far-right”.
How is that siding with genocide?
Are you claiming that the German government is running that instance?
They ban supporting or advocating actually stopping the genocide
Users can engage in regulated quantities of vague and pointless criticism of the ongoing genocide, as a treat.
Feddit.org now bans
- The sentence “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”
- Comparing Israel to the Nazis
- Calls to end Zionism
- Calling for the dissolution of Israel
Tbh, I can understand it. There have been police raids kicking in doors of families with small children at 5 in the morning for having a Facebook post saying “from the … to the …” (I am also in Germany…). The police went through all of the families belongings and took all web-connected electronics.
The situation is really rough here in Germany.
Lets not validate the intimidation tactics of the g*rman police. From the river to the sea.
Do you have a source about that incident? Reminds me of a dude arrested in russia for holding a blank piece of paper.
I did not leave reddit to come to a fucked down version of political censorship. fuck you and begone. I’m blocking their instance
THATS how we vote.
How do I do this from an app like Boost?
Don’t know if it’ll be much help but on my app (thunder) you go to the instance, press the little (i) and then block community. It will probably be something similar on most apps.
How do i do this from a browser?
I don’t blame the mods as they have little say in the matter but it’s sad to see never the less.
So they’re basically declaring themselves a fascist instance. I mean calling for end of Zionism is calling for an end of a fascist ideal, therefore that instance is declaring itself a fascist organization. Simple. Yeah no one should be Federated with this place.
It’s wild how lies and propaganda spread in real time.
So they’re joining the Nazis. They can fuck off and die.
weren’t the na*is litterally against that group of people?
You know, the bad part of nazism is the genociding. Not really the specific of their racial hierarchy. If Bolsanero or whatever his name is decide that the state must take care of the True Brazilian and mass murder everybody else, he’d be a nazi
no they supported israel since they promised to help with “the jewish question” by resettling them.
The nazis hate jews and israel took advantage of that to get more bodies to settle their frontier. Notably they even helped the nazis circumvent a boycott going on at the time to achieve this.
No, Christians were against the Jews. The nazis just took advantage of that hate. If you think that the nazis somehow had legitimate complaints against Jews or that those complaints were required to be in anyway accurate, then you have completely misunderstood the history of the last 100 years.
thank you
So basically just knockoff reddit then?
It says it in the name. Reddit but for and by the feds.
That and .world every time someone suggests that genocide is bad.
both are regime fronts on fedi.
It amazing to see how organic opinion is against them and without centralized social media they can’t suppress this sentiment.
Makes you wonder how often public opinions get subverted by these regime whore shills.
I doubt Lemmy has any major effect on public option at large. Reddit never did when they supported Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders, at the height of its user count/activity.
But I don’t doubt that Lemmy enables echo chambers and filter bubbles that enable people to brush aside any criticism of their favorite politician or nation-state as The Good Guys.
Lemmy is the most ML oriented community I’ve been in… Well, it literally has been created by ML
Oh for sure, I don’t doubt that.
But I don’t think Lemmy has any impact beyond maybe one person somewhere changing their opinion on a company.
I don’t think you get banned for upvoting Luigi here yet
Yet.
Removed by mod
Read the comments and see who’s catching bans. It’s one thing to be made to comply by force, it’s another to be celebrating that you’re now gonna be censoring anti Zionists
Unsurprising, still disappointing.
well, fuck feddit.org then. Any place thats too busy fellating genocide deserves to be abandoned and blocked. If they think they matter, they are wrong.
Oh shit, the (White) Power Rankings heating up as feddit takes up an unexpected lead against stormfront.world
sounds like grounds for defederation. protecting fascism is fascism.
I find it more disgusting than .ml and even hexbear, Chinese Human rights violations lean towards cultural genocide, Israel is killing, starving, dislocating and destroying their culture, ethnicity, community and land, it is as bad as it can get, any defence of Israel is disgusting for me, and criticism of Palestine on that front is very ill timed in that manner, you can’t worry about ‘terrorism’ when the alternative is extermination
CuLtUrAl GeNoCiDe
Go to xiaohongshu right now and look at all the uyghurs sharing their music, food, language, stories, spreading their culture freely on a predominantly chinese app!
Whole ass street festivals in the main streets going on in xinjiang of uyghurs celebrating community
easiest fake news to dispel but god forbid (redd/lemm)itors step out of their bubble
has boy boy made a video on Xinjiang I can watch yet?
no idea who youre talking about
They’re a youtube channel run by a pair of leftist Australian rascals. They even have a video where they try to enter a CIA base in Australia.
Wanna take bets .world won’t defederate Feddit because muh freeze peach?
That peter griffin chart where freeze peach is for the whites
Freeze peach is when you advocate for murder of brown people, otherwise it’s white genocide to not advocate for murder.
betting 100 dollars (not going to you of course) that feddit will remain federated for .world, sh.itjust.works and my home instance, discuss.online
Damn, I could use that 100 buckazoids 😔
I posted several threads asking for that and got REAMED.
The devs are tankies, the largest instances indirectly support fascism (and the tankies), and the biggest European instance is explicitly choosing to support neonazis.
Lemmy is dead.
Such a pain you can’t block an entite instance (at least not that I’ve found on Sync) and have to block the individual communities one by one. I blocked the ones with over 500 subscribers and i suppose the others will get blocked as they show up in my Everything feed.
There’s no way i want to be a part of German genocide whitewashing.
Sounds like you need to use a different app then. Cuz I’m pretty sure you can block instances on most other ones. I use connect and I blocked a number of instances.
you should be able to do that from the web interface, and it will apply to any apps because your server does the filtering.
fyi, some are already blocking lemmy.ml too. I’m not yet sure if I want to go that far, but I’m getting tired of their china apologism. and this community is also on ml, soo…
China apologism 😂 fucking hell I swear most of y’all would slot right in during jim crow or the yellow peril. If white society says you’re an animal it’s up to PoC to prove we’re not (and if we do it’s apologia)
